On A New Strategy of Promoter Recognition

Michael Zhang

Due to the combinatorial and modular nature of eukaryotic gene
promoters, it is necessary to take both general and gene-class
specific appoaches to the promoter recognition problem. For the
general approach, we propose to divide the problem into two
related discrimination sub-problems: (1) given a large genomic
DNA sequence of 100 kb or larger, how to localize a promoter into
a 1-2 kb (extended-promoter) region; (2) given such an
extended-promoter region, how to further localize a
Transcriptional Start Site into a 50-100 bp (Core-promoter)
region? We shall describe some recent results on the second
sub-problem where we have applied the Quaratic Discriminant
Analysis using positional k-tuple measures.